Greedy Goblin

Thursday, August 9, 2012

Guide to riches for low/null/WH veterans

PS: I made my decision about which carrier I'll learn first: The Nidhoggur. It is motivated by th battle at 49-U6U. PL-TEST fielded a clearly superior fleet of carriers and battleships and lost because the battleships were shield and the carriers were armor, doing drone-dps and they were in separate fleet. Let's see the unique bonuses of the carriers:

I think the capital doctrines still did not respond to the titan-doomsday nerf. They couldn't because besides PL no one dares to field even caps. That nerf placed sub-battleships to the sov battle map. You can lose the battle even if you maintain complete capital-supercapital supremacy. I think 49-U6U was the true rise of sub-battleships. They can simply ignore/outmaneuver slowcat carriers, supercarriers, dreads, titans, destroy the enemy subcaps, complete the mission objectives and warp away. This change was in the air for long, the rise of the Drakefleet was sign of this, but at 49-U6U it became an objective reality. The fleet with supercaps "owning the field" lost to Tengus.

There are two counter of Tengus and Drakes. The cheap-zerg is simply more Drakes a'la CFC. The ISK-based counter is tracking Rokhs, tracking Maelstroms supported not by logis (they are food for a BC/SC fleet, 150+ died that day) but by spider carriers. Of course carriers can be countered by dreads and supers and those are mostly armor. So if the subcap fleet is supported by shield carriers, the supercaps coming to save them against an enemy super hotdrop can't receive repairs from them. Here comes the Nidhoggur with 2 shield, 2 armor transporters (both receive unique bonus for amount) and one triage modules. In subcap phase they run without triage and just keep the battleships alive who are busy hunting. When supercaps arrive, they don't need to be on the same fleet, as supers don't die in a second, there is time to call for reps via coms. If the things get rough, they can go triage and hero-save the supers. Any supers, not just armor ones. Please note that I don't want to slowcat it. It's not an offensive carrier, it'll probably run repping drones. The point is to keep the high-resist battleships invincible against anything that can't alpha them.

Nidhoggur resists are OK, even if not so great as of Chimeras, its only weakness is that it can be oneshotted by doom. And who cares? They don't cost more than 5 Scimitars One has to recognize that carriers aren't special, they are expendable ships like Scimis. The price of the whole slowcat fleet in this battle was about the half of the total value destroyed, so they are definitely not "too expensive". Also, a Nid costs 1/100 of a titan that can be tackled and killed if it comes to doom.

21 comments:

Aka they deploy sentries, not fightersThis leaves them safe from smartbombs but vulnerable to bombs (which are easier to avoid)

They were stationary in range of the station to protect it from fleet coming into range (anything that got within range got torn to shreds)

The shield fleet support nidhoggur would have to be a fairly large amount of them, and without triage (Fleets that size will break a triage tank with ease.)While they do cost around 8-10 cruiser sized logi (dont forget the fit) and pretty much anchor the fleet to their repping range Allowing for sniping fleets to nibble at their subcaps without allowing for the subcaps to go on the offensive.

what i mean to say is that in large fleets you will kill your mobility when you use capital logistics, and its simply an open invitation to a super escalation.at which point i wish you good luck with just two armor reppers per ship.

49- would've blown this fleet up, allthough im not sure if AAA would have been willing to commit supers.

As for your guide to riches, imagine if you directly received truly obscene bounty payouts for pvp kills. Would that make you give up station trading and jump in a rifter? If not, why would you think any null dweller who doesn't already have a trader alt because all his costs is already covered by space socialism would suddenly want to start station trading?

WH dwellers who know what they're doing are already stupid rich. As for people in low/null, most of them went there to get away from having to make their money flipping market orders or hauling crap around empire space.

A month old character in a purifier (amarr stealth bomber) can easily blitz lvl 4 fw missions. Throughout the entire month of july I was running these missions in a Caracal Navy Issue (it can kite everything at 70k and be fine).

With the skill 'security connections' at level 5, I was getting around 30k lp for every level 4 mission I did. I would also get around 8k lp for every level 3 mission. I could blitz most of the missions in less than 5 minutes each.

A normal cycle of 24 missions (12 level 4s and 12 level 3s) gave me a payout of around 460k lp. For the average missioner in fw, that would be 300k lp an hour.

At tier 5 warzone control, you could get +3 learning implants from the minmitar militia lp store for 1 mil isk and 1k lp. This was approximately a 5-6k isk/lp ratio.

Every weekend, minmitar would hit tier 5 contol and I would be able to liquidate millions of lp. But lets back it up a second.

At 5k isk/lp, the average missioner making 300k lp an hour is effectively making 1.5 billion an hour if they liquidate at level 5 warzone control. Also this is off of a single account, many people were using 2 or 3 different accounts to mission makeing 3 and 4.5 billion isk per hour respectively.

While I am sure that eventually it is possible to reach a scale of trading where you make considerably more than that, fw is (or was last month) around a 50% increase in income from your current 1bil an hour profit ratio.

@Anonymous: if your imaginary 1.5B/hour would be anywhere near real, the market would already be crashed by the amount of LP store items flooded to the market.

I doubt if you measured time correctly at blitzing missions. People often use their very best numbers as average. I once bought a Slave Omega for 700M and sold it for 800M exactly 2 minutes later. Yay, my ISK/hour is 3B/hour from just that one item. You have to include waiting time because of PvP too.

Secondly you assumed T5 warzone control that happened exactly twice in the history and both last less than 2 hours, with N2S being on Amarr it won't be easy to do third time.

Thirdly you need to have ISK to buy items in the shop. If you had your imaginary 300k/hour LP, then you have to save 300M ISK every hour to be able to cash out on those implants.

To make it perfect, you calculate with current Jita prices, while last time it happened the FW people were filling up very underpriced buy orders. I remember your precious +3 implants selling for 2M on those days, providing the "wonderful" 1000 ISK/LP ratio.

I don't doubt that FW matches incursions but nothing above that. Just think! Every Tom Dick and Harriett are doing FW nowadays and still the volumes are not skyrocketing. I wonder why.

Please atleast show the courtesy of cross checking my numbers. If you looked up the amount of lp given from a lvl 4 fw mission, you would see around 20k (sometimes a bit more, sometimes a bit less)and if you add the 50% lp bonus from security connections at 5 then you get 30k, which happens to be the number I describe.

Similarily if you looked the missions up you would see that to complete them, you only need to destroy between 1 and 6 things depending on the mission. These are usually structures or industrials that can be destroyed in 2 or 3 shots. Suddenly the times to complete the mission seem the be in line with what Ive described as well.

Now realize that the lp store has many items, implants, ships, bpcs, faction modules. Look at the decline in the price of +5 implants last month. It does seem reasonable, given the crashs and declines, that some people would be holding stocks of items and slowly putting them on the market.

+3 implants were not the only thing I bought with lp, but I clearly remember the price they are at the lp store at t5.

As far as your implant comment, if you traded that implant 30 times over and did it consistantly enough, then I would concee that you can easily make 3bil an hour. However if you only traded that implant once, I could make the case that because I can get a 30k lp mission done in an average of 5 minutes, that I make 600k lp an hour. For the record it is impossible to make 600k lp an hour off of faction warfare missions merely because of the limited number of agents.

I will admit that most people doing fw are only orbiting beacons in caldari space. This gives roughly 200mil an hour if you are very lucky with spawns and completely undisturbed. However I do admit that most of the time, orbiting beacons is similar income to what incursions used to be.

@Anonymous: I can't determine if you are troll or just can't count. Missions are available in UNLIMITED number. Tell me, why do all the mission runners run 40-50M/hour missions instead of your magical 1B/hour missions. There is no competition, there is no danger, there is no nothing just ISK print. Why don't everyone print it?

Ok, so a dedicated FW runner can't make serious amounts of cash because then everybody would do it.

By that logic you can't make serious cash by trading because if everybody would do it prices would be near equilibrium. After all, you are claiming over and over again that trading is "easy" and everybody can do it. So why don't they?

"PL-TEST fielded a clearly superior fleet of carriers and battleships and lost because the battleships were shield and the carriers were armor, doing drone-dps and they were in separate fleet."

Who won, and who lost? TEST took massive subcap losses, but held their station. PL didn't take any significant carrier losses. TEST lost the ISK war substantially. Why do you think the PL+TEST fleet was "clearly" superior? Raw numbers?

There are several reasons TEST lost the ISK war. Their pilots are less skilled, less well organized and less well funded than AAA pilots. Their strategy was poor. They had to defend the strategic objective (the station), and AAA knew that and used it to extract maximum kills. Individual pilots in TEST expect reimbursement so they don't have any incentive to save their own ships if shot at (infact it's profitable for the average pilot to lose their ship if they fly logistics).

The carriers (who were probably mostly PL) were used only defensively, and it's been done before (C-J maybe 4 months ago, and AAA won in that battle). They were not designed to support the subcap fleet.

So, onto your proposals: Carrier + Battleship fleets do work very well, but the issue is mobility, and it can't be understated how much of a limitation it is. Realistically, a carrier + battleship fleet can only be used if the battlefield is stationary (like a station). Carrier + BS fleets are most often used in small engagements, where one side will tempt the other by bringing a battleship fleet with poor logistics, then once the battle starts will hotdrop in 5 carriers to support the battleships.

The choice of the nid? I'm not sure it makes much sense. The advantage of a shield subcap fleet is it's ability to move around fast, but that ability is negated by having carriers along. An armor BS fleet with archon support makes more sense, because the armor battleships have more tank than the shield ones (more alpha needed to kill them, more time for carrier reps to land), and archons themselves support each other better than nids, and can be fit to tank single doomsdays. Of course if you want rokhs/maelstroms then you need shield carriers, that's obvious, but abaddons would be a better counter to drakes anyway.

One more quote:"Please note that I don't want to slowcat it. It's not an offensive carrier ..."

Not that I want more nublets just running to FW to get rich, his numbers are true, just perfect world.

Perfect world being that your FW missions are all in the same system. Even if you go grab them all at once, you are going to be transversing 30 to 50 missions at once. Simply picking up the missions would take an hour. And then 3 hours to run them.

So while yes, you can blitz them very easily in a SB or better, in under 5 mins, it takes 15 mins to pick up missions, and then another 15 to get to that system, and then 5 to run, then 5 to get back.

Best alternative is to get into groups so that you all pick up as many as possible, run together, most likely your missions will be in the same systems or close and then you all cash out together your L4s.

It is very good LP, and with the new system, with Tier 5 you are talking massive gain.

So yes, cash cow. Now it's just easy and less expensive to simply take a a cheap Merlin and orbit a button.

To answer your question Gevlon, yes, the massive buyouts have definitely taken a toll on the markets. I mean seeing Fleet Tempest for 120M is ludicrous. Firetails at 10M. My god.

The Minnie days of teir 5 back to back destroyed the market. And it considerably hurt other markets. Unless you were early on the buyout the only safe way was to go implants. Thankfully that didn't hurt the market quite that terribly.

But yes, if it starts with Fleet Issue or Republic, you can be sure that the last 2 months, there is a massive discount and that's because of over saturation.

Not that I want to give you any heads up. But any day now, Nulli Secunda is going to finally flip all the systems they have in vulnurable and cash out Amarr at T5. While they are mostly going to be cashign out for their own inventory, others like Fweddit and gang will be jumping on the ISK making game. And you'll see Imperial Navy items value drop through the floor.

I can tell you, and ensure you that FW is extremely profitable. Ridiculously so. We make ISK. But we spend it amazing fast too.

This guy loses, no joke, 8B worth in T3, pirate faction ships a month. And he's not buying PLEX.

Now while we aren't all pulling 10B a month. The good veteran FW are.

FW is a modest way of making ISK while still PVPing. It's a good trade off. Instead of just having alts over alts to make you ISK to PVP with like most of Null Sec on Pies. FW has a solo player stable economy in itself.

It's nothing to scoff at. And frankly, used correctly, is the most profitable thing in game. But that depends on your Factions Teir, your efforts, standings, and investment. And willing be in danger to make ISK.

Even if the theoretical ISK/hour of low/null/WH PvE is 100M/hour, you don't get a single penny if you don't have a minute to PvE because you are called into a fleet or roam before you'd even log in the game. Get a stopwatch and book your hours, PvP and PvE!

the Actual Isk/hr in a wormhole is much higher than 100m an hour. 200m an hour is actually very easy to get without trying hard at all. Then take into account gassing and PI.. without trying *at all* its easy to make 2 or 3b a week which is more than ample to fly just about anything you want and not give a crap about losing it. If you work hard at wormholes you can make *alot* more

Finally and most importantly: the whole null/low/WH culture is "PvP". Every alliance recruit PvP-ers. "Carebear" is a curse. You can be kicked for making money.

please stop making stuff up Gevlon. no wormhole corp I know of will kick people for making money. In fact, all that I know of actively run alliance wide "isking" ops to pay for the PvP.

You are here because despite you did all the things that the community considers "cool" and "l33t", you are dirt poor.

Check out the loss mails of the top 10 wormhole corps and try telling us that we're "poor". 1.5b+ isk T3s get lost all the time *and no shits are given*. Oh and we generally do all that WITHOUT ship replacement programs (my alliance replaces logistics and thats it).

its not whether or not CCP can see it, its whether or not the info is revealed by the API so that players can see it.

player to player trades are visible via the API (comes up in the journal if I recall correctly) - jetcan trading does not (though you can't trade isk this way so you'd have to do it with some high value commodity which leaves you at risk of losing stuff)